


Everyone Thinks She's Golden

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Character Study, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 12:21:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13811091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: A little character study of Cat Grant.





	Everyone Thinks She's Golden

Everyone thinks she’s golden.  The only people who know otherwise are the ones that get too close.

 

Money and fame and incredible fashion sense and a figure that can still turn heads at 49 makes them think that she’s got it all together.  That she’s fashionable by nature, terrible by choice.  It’s only the ones that get too close know different.

 

Carter’s father had gotten too close.  He wanted more children, more domesticity, more intimacy.  She couldn’t give him that.  She burdened him with the dizzying list of her sexual indiscretions hoping it would drive him away.  When that failed, she declared herself a lesbian and quit.

 

Kara got too close.  Kara tried to love her, tried so hard.  Kara got whipped back on her heels by the seething mass of self hatred.  A locomotive couldn’t knock Kara Danvers out, but the turbulence in Cat Grant’s heart could.  Even when Cat wanted to love her, even when she tried to be kind, she was demanding, she was hurtful.  Kara’s heart was a wholesome one, and true.  Kara had survived a planet-sized wound, the kind Cat would never know, but Kara chose love.  Kara chose openness.  Cat had not managed to figure out how to do that.

 

Lena Luthor had gotten too close.  Cat convinced herself that the problem was Kara, that Kara was too soft, too sweet, too sensitive.  Made of steel, but not made of the stuff to stand the endless labor of loving Cat Grant.  Lena was sophisticated, brilliant, from a family of deeply dysfunctional people.  She would know how to deal with Cat’s cutting remarks, her moods, her temperamental moments, the pulling in and pushing away.  She would know how to deal with the inexplicable anger that curdled in her blood sometimes.  But Lena’s heart was even softer than Kara’s, it turned out.  Lena’s heart needed even more love.

 

It wasn’t that Cat didn’t want love.  She craved it, in fact.  She thirsted after it.  She wanted the blissful feeling of being carried in Kara’s powerful arms or the thrill of Lena pouring her a scotch and giving her a long, thirsty look.  She clutched those nights in their beds to herself, clutched them close and counted them again and again.  

 

It wasn’t that she didn’t want love.  It was that she didn’t know what to do with it when she had it.  It was that she didn’t really think she deserved it, not really.  

 

Everyone thinks she’s golden.  They think she’s in control.  They don’t see the trail of broken hearts, broken dishes, broken shoes hurled through a window.  They don’t see her spending hours choosing an outfit and checking again and again to be sure it wrings every advantage from every asset she still possesses.  They don’t understand the work that goes into looking so effortless.  They don’t understand that she’s terrible by nature, that she doesn’t want to be, but that it leaks through sometimes, dribbles through her fingers even when she’s clasping them to her chest.  There are things inside her that she doesn’t want to know any better, things she can partially quiet with antidepressants but not always, and not enough.  Things that are not golden.  

 

The only ones who know it are the ones that get too close.


End file.
